John Smith (1634-1680)
}} Salem Quaker Convert In the late 1650s, Robert Harper of Sandwich in Plymouth Colony, had been heavily fined as much as £44 over time, for attending Quaker meetings and repeatedly refusing to take the fidelity oath (taking an oath was contrary to Jesus’ command in Matthew 5:33-35 not to swear at all.); he was whipped 15 stripes with a 3-knot gut scourge (that's at least 45 wounds); he and his wife Deborah Perry Harper were set in Boston prison with no food unless an outsider paid for it, hard labor, and with no heat during winter in the Little Ice Age. Their fellow members in the Friends, and co-signers of the document above, were John and Margaret (Thompson) Smith of Salem, Massachusetts, parents of several children, at least three of whom grew up to marry and have families of their own. In a letter to Governor John Endecott, their former neighbor, in spring 1660, John Smith wrote: "O governour, governour, do not think that my love to my wife is at all abated, because I sit still silent, and do not seek her ... freedom, which if I did would not avail.... Upon examination of her, there being nothing justly laid to her charge, yet to fulfil your wills, it was determined, that she must have ten stripes in the open market place her clothes were torn off before her whipping, it being very cold, the snow lying by the walls, and the wind blowing cold ... it being snowy, wet weather, not fit for a woman to travel in, putting her into the prison again, all wet with the cold snow, a most cruel thing, and there kept her in the winter season, not regarding her if she had been frozen to death. ... My love is much more increased to her, because I see your cruelty so much enlarged to her." It's highly likely that the other women of this group were also stripped in public and whipped. In Salem, several Quaker women were whipped nearly to death, after which they were supposed to be dragged over stumps and rocks 15 miles through the frozen forest to be left to die and be torn by animals. Apparently the carters had some measure of mercy, for somehow the women survived. Perhaps they were left with farmers or Indians, or the carters sneaked the women back to people who would help. What earned prison for the people in this petition? In October 1660, they went to Salem to visit other Quakers under persecution—the same thing that Mary Dyer had done several times and was hanged for the previous June 1, 1660. One of their number, Mary Southwick Trask, had Quaker family in Salem who had suffered banishment, fines, prison, and an attempt to sell her brother and sister as slaves. The entire group knew exactly what might happen to them, and they purposely set out to defy “the bloody law.” They committed civil disobedience in the cause of religious freedom. The Harpers were no strangers to heavy fines (which seemed to be repeated several times a year, probably as a lucrative business for the magistrates) or arrests. Though they were subject to Plymouth Colony courts, they were incarcerated at Boston, in Massachusetts Bay Colony, probably for trespassing in the Bay to preach or visit other Quakers. References * Dyer Family Genealogy Blog